by Lee Child
So, a clean sedan from a mainstream manufacturer, not new, but not too old either. Easy to find in Vegas. Five minutes, tops. But not in rural Nebraska. Not in farm country. He had just walked all over town looking for Asghar, and ninety percent of what he had seen had been utilitarian, either pick-up trucks or ancient four-wheel drives, and ninety-nine percent of those had been worn out, all battered and corroded and failing. Apparently Nebraskans didn’t have much money, and even if they did they seemed to favor an ostentatiously blue-collar lifestyle.
He stood in the cold and reviewed his options. He mapped out the blocks he had quartered before, and he tried to identify the kind of density he needed, and he came up with nothing. He had seen a sign to a hospital, and hospital parking lots were often good, because doctors bought new cars and sold their lightly used cast-offs to nurses and medical students, but for all he knew the hospital was miles away, certainly too far to walk without a guarantee of success.
So he started in the Marriott lot.
And finished there.
He walked all around the H-shaped hotel and saw three pick-up trucks, two with fitted camper beds, and an old Chrysler sedan with Arizona plates and a dented fender and sun-rotted paint, and a blue Chevrolet Impala, and a red Ford Taurus, and a black Cadillac. The pick-ups and the old Chrysler were out of the question for obvious reasons. The Impala and the Taurus were out of the question because they were too new, and they were obviously rentals, because they had bar code stickers in the rear side windows, which meant that almost certainly they belonged to Safir’s guys and Rossi’s guys, and he couldn’t call them down to the lot and have them find him sitting in one of their own cars.
Which left the Cadillac. Right age, right style. Local plates, neat, discreet, well looked after, clean and polished. Black glass. Practically perfect. A no-brainer. He put his bag on the ground right next to it and dropped flat and shuffled on his back until his head was underneath the engine. He had a tiny LED Maglite on his key chain, and he fumbled it out and lit it up and went hunting. Cars of that generation had a module bolted to the frame designed to detect a frontal impact. A simple accelerometer, with a two-stage function. Worst case, it would trigger the airbags. Short of that, it would unlock the doors, so that first responders could drag dazed drivers to safety. A gift to car thieves everywhere, therefore not much publicized, and replaced almost immediately with more sophisticated systems.
He found the module. It was a simple tin can, square and small, cheap and basic, all caked in dry dirt, with wires coming out of it. He took out his knife and used the butt end of the handle and banged hard on the module. Dirt flaked off, but nothing else happened. He thought the dirt was maybe insulating the force of the blow, so he popped the blade on his knife and scraped the front of the module clean. Then he closed the blade and tried again. Nothing happened. He tried a third time, hard enough to worry about the noise he was making, bang, and the message got through. The Cadillac’s dim electronic brain thought it had just suffered a minor frontal impact, not serious enough for the airbags, but serious enough to consider the first responders. There were four ragged thumps from above, and the doors unlocked.
Technology. A wonderful thing.
Mahmeini’s man scrambled out and stood up. A minute later his bag was on the back seat and he was in the driver’s seat. It was set way back. There was enough leg room for a giant. More proof, as if he needed any. Like he had told Rossi’s guy, American peasants were all huge. He found the button and buzzed the cushion forward, on and on, about a foot, and then he jacked the seat back upright and got to work.
He used the tip of his blade to force the steering lock, and then he pulled off the column shroud and stripped the wires he needed with the knife and touched them together. The engine started and a chime told him he didn’t have his seat belt on. He buckled up and backed out and turned around and waited in the narrow lane parallel to the long side of the H, the engine idling silently, the climate control already warming.
Then he pulled out his phone and went through the Marriott switchboard, first to Safir’s guys, then to Rossi’s, in both cases following Mahmeini’s script exactly, telling them that plans had changed, that the party was starting early, that he and Asghar were leaving for the north immediately, and that they had five minutes to get their asses in gear, no more, or they would be left behind.
The SUV was a GMC Yukon, metallic gold in color, equipped to a high standard with a couple of option packs. It had beige leather inside. It was a nice truck. Certainly the kid called John seemed proud of it, and Reacher could see why. He was looking forward to owning it for the next twelve hours, or however long his remaining business in Nebraska might take.
He said, “Got a cell phone, John?”
The guy paused a fatal beat and said, “No.”
Reacher said, “And you were doing so well. But now you’re screwing up. Of course you’ve got a cell phone. You’re part of an organization. You were on sentry duty. And you’re under thirty, which means you were probably born with a minutes plan.”
The guy said, “You’re going to do to me what you did to the others.”
“What did I do?”
“You crippled them.”
“What were they going to do to me?”
The guy didn’t answer that. They were on the two-lane road, north of the motel, well out in featureless farm country, rolling steadily along, nothing to see beyond the headlight beams. Reacher was half-turned in his seat, his left hand on his knee, his right wrist resting on his left forearm, the Glock held easy in his right hand.
Reacher said, “Give me your cell phone, John.” He saw movement in the guy’s eyes, a flash of speculation, a narrowing of the lids. Fair warning. The guy jacked his butt off the seat and took one hand off the wheel and dug in his pants pocket. He came out with a phone, slim and black, like a candy bar. He went to hand it over, but he lost his grip on it for a moment and juggled it and dropped it in the passenger footwell.
“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Reacher smiled.
“Good try, John,” he said. “Now I bend over to pick it up, right? And you cave the back of my skull in with your right fist. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”
The guy said nothing.
Reacher said, “So I guess we’ll leave it right where it is. If it rings, we’ll let it go to voice mail.”
“I had to try.”
“Is that an apology? You promised me.”
“You’re going to break my legs and dump me on the side of the road.”
“That’s a little pessimistic. Why would I break both of them?”
“It’s not a joke. Those four guys you hurt will never work again.”
“They’ll never work for the Duncans again. But there are other things to do in life. Better things.”
“Like what?”
“You could shovel shit on a chicken farm. You could whore yourself out in Tijuana. With a donkey. Either thing would be better than working for the Duncans.”
The guy said nothing. Just drove.
Reacher asked, “How much do the Duncans pay you?”
“More than I could get back in Kentucky.”
“In exchange for what, precisely?”
“Just being around, mostly.”
Reacher asked, “Who are those Italian guys in the overcoats?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know.”
They were in the blue Impala, already ten miles north of the Marriott, Roberto Cassano at the wheel, Angelo Mancini sitting right beside him. Cassano was working hard to stay behind Safir’s boys in their red Ford, and both drivers were working hard to keep Mahmeini’s guys in sight. The big black Cadillac was really hustling. It was doing more than eighty miles an hour. It was way far outside of its comfort zone. It was bouncing and wallowing and floating. It was quite a s
ight. Angelo Mancini was staring ahead at it. He was obsessed with it.
He asked, “Is it a rental?”
Cassano was much quieter. Occupied by driving, certainly, concentrating on the crazy high-speed dash up the road, definitely, but thinking, too. Thinking hard.
He said, “I don’t think it’s a rental.”
“So what is it? I mean, what? Those guys have their own cars standing by in every state? Just in case? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Cassano said.
“I thought at first maybe it’s a limo. You know, like a car service. But it isn’t. I saw the little squirt driving it himself. Not a car service driver. Just a glimpse, but it was him. The one who mouthed off at you.”
Cassano said, “I didn’t like him.”
“Me either. And even less now. They’re way bigger than we are. Way bigger than we thought. I mean, they have their own cars on standby in every state? They fly in on the casino plane, and there’s a car there for them, wherever? What’s that about?”
“I don’t know,” Cassano said again.
“Is it a funeral car? Do the Iranians run funeral parlors now? That could work, right? Mahmeini could call the nearest parlor and say, send us one of your cars.”
“I don’t think the Iranians took over the funeral business.”
“So what else? I mean, how many states are there? Fifty, right? That’s at least fifty cars standing by.”
“Not even Mahmeini can be active in all fifty states.”
“Maybe not Alaska and Hawaii. But he’s got cars in Nebraska, apparently. How far up the list is Nebraska likely to be?”
“I don’t know,” Cassano said again.
“OK,” Mancini said. “You’re right. It has to be a rental.”
“I told you it’s not a rental,” Cassano said. “It can’t be. It’s not a current model.”
“Times are tough. Maybe they rent older cars now.”
“It’s not even last year’s model. Or the year before. That’s practically an antique. That’s an old-guy car. That’s your neighbor’s granddad’s Cadillac.”
“Maybe they have rent-a-wreck here.”
“Why would Mahmeini need that?”
“So what is it?”
“It doesn’t really matter what it is. You’re not looking at the big picture. You’re missing the point.”
“Which is what?”
“That car was already at the hotel. We parked right next to it, remember? Late afternoon, when we got back. Those guys were there before us. And you know what that means? It means they got there before Rossi even asked Mahmeini to send them. Something really weird is going on here.”
The metallic gold GMC Yukon turned left off the north-south two-lane and headed west toward Wyoming on another two-lane that was just as straight and featureless as the first. Reacher pictured planners and engineers a century before, hard at work, leaning over parchment maps and charts with long rulers and sharp pencils, drawing roads, dispatching crews, opening up the interior. He asked, “How far now, John?”
The kid said, “We’re real close,” which as always turned out to be a relative statement. Real close in some places meant fifty yards, or a hundred. In Nebraska it meant ten miles and fifteen minutes. Then Reacher saw a group of dim lights, off to the right, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The truck slowed and turned, another precise ninety-degree angle, and headed north on a blacktop strip engineered in a different way from the standard county product. A private approach road, leading toward what looked like a half-built or half-demolished industrial facility of some kind. There was a concrete rectangle the size of a football field, possibly an old parking lot but more likely the floor slab of a factory that had either never been completed or had been later dismantled. It was enclosed on all four sides by a head-high hurricane fence that was topped by a mean and token allocation of razor wire. Here and there the fence posts carried lights, like domestic backyard fixtures, containing what must have been regular sixty- or hundred-watt bulbs. The whole enormous space was empty, apart from two gray panel vans in a marked-off bay big enough to handle three.
The approach road was scalloped out at one point to allow access in and out of the concrete rectangle through a pair of gates. Then it ran onward toward a long low one-story building built of brick in an unmistakable style. Classic 1940s industrial architecture. The building was an office block, built to serve the factory it once stood next to. The factory would have been a defense plant, almost certainly. Give a government a choice of where to build in wartime, and it will seek the safe center of a landmass, away from coastal shelling and marauding airplanes and potential invasion sites. Nebraska and other heartland states had been full of such places. The ones lucky enough to be engaged on fantasy Cold War systems were probably still in business. The ones built to produce basic war-fighting items like boots and bullets and bandages had perished before the ink was dry on the armistice papers.
The kid called John said, “This is it. We live in the office building.”
The building had a flat roof with a brick parapet, and a long line of identical windows, small panes framed with white-painted steel. In the center was an unimpressive double door with a lobby behind it and dim bulkhead lights either side of it. In front of the doors was a short concrete path that led from an empty rectangle made of cracked and weedy paving stones, the size of two tennis courts laid end to end. Managerial parking, presumably, back in the day. There were no lights on inside the building. It just stood there, dead to the world.
Reacher asked, “Where are the bedrooms?”
John said, “To the right.”
“And your buddies are in there now?”
“Yes. Five of them.”
“Plus you, that’s six legs to break. Let’s go do it.”
Chapter 38
Reacher made the guy get out of the truck the same way he had before, through the passenger door, awkward and unbalanced and unable to spring any surprises. He tracked him with the Glock and glanced beyond the wire and asked, “Where are all the harvest trucks?”
The guy said, “They’re in Ohio. Back at the factory, for refurbishment. They’re specialist vehicles, and some of them are thirty years old.”
“What are the two gray vans for?”
“This and that. Service and repairs, tires, things like that.”
“Are there supposed to be three?”
“One is out. It’s been gone a few days.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know.”
Reacher asked, “When do the big trucks get back?”
The guy said, “Spring.”
“What’s this place like in the early summer?”
“Pretty busy. The first alfalfa crop gets harvested early. There’s a lot of preparation ahead of time and a lot of maintenance afterward. This place is humming.”
“Five days a week?”
“Seven, usually. We’re talking forty thousand acres here. That’s a lot of output.” The guy closed the passenger door and took a step. Then he stopped dead, because Reacher had stopped dead. Reacher was staring ahead at the empty rectangle in front of the building. The cracked stones. The managerial parking lot. Nothing in it.
Reacher asked, “Where do you normally park your truck, John?”
“Right out front there, by the doors.”
“Where do your buddies park?”
“Same place.”
“So where are they?”
The nighttime silence clamped down and the young man’s mouth came open a little, and he whirled around as if he was expecting his friends to be hiding somewhere behind him. Like a practical joke. But they weren’t. He turned back and said, “I guess they’re out. They must have gotten a call.”
“From you?” Reacher asked. “When you saw Mrs. Duncan?”
“No, I swear. I didn’t call. You can check my phone.”
“So who called them?”
“Mr. Duncan, I guess. Mr. Jacob, I me
an.”
“Why would he?”
“I don’t know. Nothing was supposed to happen tonight.”
“He called them but he didn’t call you?”
“No, he didn’t call me. I swear. Check my phone. He wouldn’t call me anyway. I’m on sentry duty. I was supposed to stay put.”
“So what’s going on, John?”
“I don’t know.”
“Best guess?”
“The doctor. Or his wife. Or both of them together. They’re always seen as the weakest link. Because of his drinking. Maybe the Duncans think they have information.”
“About what?”
“You, of course. About where you are and what you’re doing and whether you’re coming back. That’s what’s on their minds.”
“It takes five guys to ask those questions?”
“Show of force,” the kid said. “That’s what we’re here for. A surprise raid in the middle of the night can shake people up.”
“OK, John,” Reacher said. “You stay here.”
“Here?”
“Go to bed.”
“You’re not going to hurt me?”
“You already hurt yourself. You showed no fight at all against a smaller, older man. You’re a coward. You know that now. That’s as good to me as a dislocated elbow.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a gun.”
Reacher put the Glock back in his pocket. He folded the flap down and stood with his arms out, hands empty, palms forward, fingers spread.
He said, “Now I don’t. So bring it on, fat boy.”
The guy didn’t move.
“Go for it,” Reacher said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
The guy didn’t move.
“You’re a coward,” Reacher said again. “You’re pathetic. You’re a waste of good food. You’re a useless three-hundred-pound sack of shit. And you’re ugly, too.”
The guy said nothing.
